Weekly "what are you reading" Thread #82

Finished Wicked. Last week I complimented the writing, but said it felt like the book was going nowhere. The latter problem is resolved in the second half, but after taking some time to chew over the writing, I've soured on it a lot.

For example, this book has very deliberately non naturalistic dialogue. Nobody talks the way a real person would in any of these scenarios. At first this feels interesting because the author has a lot of freedom to play with language and the weirdness of the setting. It's often a lot of fun to read, and it feels like you're "in" on some private joke. But the cumulative effect lowers the emotional stakes a lot because everyone feels like a literary construction first and a person second. Also, many of the "literary" things Maguire's people say are just not interesting once you scratch past the cleverness. I get the sense that many of the book's long philosophical discussions are ironic and deliberately vacuous, because of the insufficiency of language against the reality of blah blah blah blah blah--but you made me read it neighbor!

Early on, there's a sequence where a character defends a piece of poor art as (ambiguously) ironic. Obviously we are meant to join in roasting this character. But I can't help but feel like this scene is a key to the book. It's scared to be direct, out of fear that people would see it as dumb and lacking if it were unspooled in front of them. The author's literary talents are considerable, and there are a lot of interesting techniques applied very well, but I can't help but feel they're being used in the service of something fundamentally unworthy.

The story's original sin is that it has nothing to do with Oz whatsoever. It's neither the book/movie Oz, nor is it some alternate "real" or "realistic" Oz. It says nothing about either Baum's work or the MGM classic. But it also doesn't work as an original setting because it's an edgelord shithole that depends heavily on the reader's familiarity with other Oz's. The setting is a gimmick to make people read the book. And for all the art on top of it, I don't find that forgivable.